A Tale of Two Cities/ Book the Third/ Chapter VI

CHAPTER VI: TRIUMPH

THE DREAD TRIBUNAL of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determined
Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and were
read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. The
standard gaoler-joke was, "Come out and listen to the Evening Paper,
you inside there!"

"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!"

So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.

When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved
for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles
Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen
hundreds pass away so.

His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over
them to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through
the list, making a similar short pause at each name. There were
twenty-three names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of
the prisoners so summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two
had already been guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in
the vaulted chamber where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners
on the night of his arrival. Every one of those had perished in the
massacre; every human creature he had since cared for and parted with,
had died on the scaffold.

There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting
was soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La
Force were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits and
a little concert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates and
shed tears there; but, twenty places in the projected entertainments
had to be refilled, and the time was, at best, short to the lock-up
hour, when the common rooms and corridors would be delivered over to
the great dogs who kept watch there through the night. The prisoners
were far from insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the
condition of the time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a
species of fervour or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have
led some persons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die
by it, was not mere boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly
shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a
secret attraction to the disease-a terrible passing inclination to die
of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only
needing circumstances to evoke them.

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in its
vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners
were put to the bar before Charles Darnay's name was called. All the
fifteen were condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hour
and a half.

"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay," was at length arraigned.

His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red
cap and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing.
Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have
thought that the usual order of things was reversed, and that the
felons were trying the honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst
populace of a city, never without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad,
were the directing spirits of the scene: noisily commenting,
applauding, disapproving, anticipating, and precipitating the
result, without a check. Of the men, the greater part were armed in
various ways; of the women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate
and drank as they looked on, many knitted. Among these last, was
one, with a spare piece of knitting under her arm as she worked. She
was in a front row, by the side of a man whom he had never seen
since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he directly remembered as
Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered in his ear, and
that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed in the two
figures was, that although they were posted as close to himself as
they could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed to be
waiting for something with a dogged determination, and they looked
at the Jury, but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor
Manette, in his usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could
see, he and Mr. Lorry were the only men there, unconnected with the
Tribunal, who wore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse
garb of the Carmagnole.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public
prosecutor as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic,
under the decree which banished all emigrants on pain of Death. It was
nothing that the decree bore date since his return to France. There he
was, and there was the decree; he had been taken in France, and his
head was demanded.

"Take off his head!" cried the audience. "An enemy to the Republic!"

The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the
prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in
England?

Undoubtedly it was.

Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?

Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.

Why not? the President desired to know.

Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distasteful
to him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left his
country- he submitted before the word emigrant in the present
acceptation by the Tribunal was in use- to live by his own industry in
England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of
France.

What proof had he of this?

He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, and
Alexandre Manette.

But he had married in England? the President reminded him.

True, but not an English woman.

A citizeness of France?

Yes. By birth.

Her name and family", "Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor
Manette, the good physician who sits there."

This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in
exaltation of the well-known good physician rent the hall. So
capriciously were the people moved, that tears immediately rolled down
several ferocious countenances which had been glaring at the
prisoner a moment before, as if with impatience to pluck him out
into the streets and kill him.

On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set
his foot according to Doctor Manette's reiterated instructions. The
same cautious counsel directed every step that lay before him, and had
prepared every inch of his road.

The President asked, why had he returned to France when he did,
and not sooner?

He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no
means of living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in
England, he lived by giving instruction in the French language and
literature. He had returned when he did, on the pressing and written
entreaty of a French citizen, who represented that his life was
endangered by his absence. He had come back, to save a citizen's life,
and to bear his testimony, at whatever personal hazard, to the
truth. Was that criminal in the eyes of the Republic?

The populace cried enthusiastically, "No!" and the President rang
his bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry
"No!" untill they left off, of their own will.

The President required the name of that citizen. The accused
explained that the citizen was his first witness. He also referred
with confidence to the citizen's letter, which had been taken from him
at the Barrier, but which he did not doubt would be found among the
papers then before the President.

The Doctor had taken care that it should be there- had assured him
that it would be there- and at this stage of the proceedings it was
produced and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did
so. Citizen Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness,
that in the pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by the
multitude of enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he had
been slightly overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye- in fact, had
rather passed out of the Tribunal's patriotic remembrance- until three
days ago; when he had been summoned before it, and had been set at
liberty on the Jury's declaring themselves satisfied that the
accusation against him was answered, as to himself, by the surrender
of the citizen Evremonde, called Darnay.

Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity,
and the cleanness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as
he proceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on
his release from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained
in England, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself in
their exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocrat
government there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, as
the foe of England and friend of the United States- as he brought
these circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and with
the straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and the
populace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to Monsieur
Lorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,
had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate his
account of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and
that they were ready with their votes if the President were content to
receive them.

At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the
populace set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the
prisoner's favour, and the President declared him free.

Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the
populace sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better
impulses towards generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as
some set-off against their swollen account of cruel rage. No man can
decide now to which of these motives such extraordinary scenes were
referable; it is probable, to a blending of all the three, with the
second predominating. No sooner was the acquittal pronounced, than
tears were shed as freely as blood at another time, and such fraternal
embraces were bestowed upon the prisoner by as many of both sexes as
could rush at him, that after his long and unwholesome confinement
he was in danger of fainting from exhaustion; none the less because he
knew very well, that the very same people, carried by another current,
would have rushed at him with the very same intensity, to rend him
to pieces and strew him over the streets.

His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be
tried, rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to be
tried together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they
had not assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to
compensate itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these five
came down to him before he left the place, condemned to die within
twenty-four hours. The first of them told him so, with the customary
prison sign of Death- a raised finger- and they all added in words,
"Long live the Republic!"

The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their
proceedings, for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate,
there was a great crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every
face he had seen in Court- except two, for which he looked in vain. On
his coming out, the concourse made at him anew, weeping, embracing,
and shouting, all by turns and all together, until the very tide of
the river on the bank of which the mad scene was acted, seemed to
run mad, like the people on the shore.

They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which
they had taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms
or passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the
back of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this
car of triumph, not even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his
being carried to his home on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of
red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy
deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his
mind being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way
to the Guillotine

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing
him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the
prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as
they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they
carried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.
Her father had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband
stood upon his feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.

As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between
his face and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips
might come together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing.
Instantly, all the rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard
overflowed with the Carmagnole. Then, they elevated into the vacant
chair a young woman from the crowd to be carried as the Goddess of
Liberty, and then swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent
streets, and along the river's bank, and over the bridge, the
Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away.

After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood victorious and proud
before him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting
in breathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the
Carmagnole; after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her
arms round his neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful
Pross who lifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up
to their rooms.

"Lucie! My own! I am safe."

"O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I
have prayed to Him."

They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again
in his arms, he said to her:

"And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this
France could have done what he has done for me."

She laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poor
head on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return
he had made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of
his strength. "You must not be weak, my darling," he remonstrated;
"don't tremble so. I have saved him."